Why does the date format change from my GedCompare to Adding a person.

Question

I have over 3,700 people in my gedcom generated from Brother's Keeper desktop software.  In that software my dates are formatted as Da Mon Year. I.E.: 12 Dec 2017.  In my GedCompare I can see the dates in that format.  However when I use my GedCompare to "Add" a person to Wikitree it converts all of my dates to Year-Mo-Da.  IE: 2017-12-12  That's a confusing way to format a date.  Why is it doing that?  Is there a way to add people into Wikitree using my GedCompare with the way I have already formatted the dates?

Answer 1

Dates in WikiTree data fields are recorded in the year-mo-da format, such as 2017-12-12. Computers aren't real flexible about data formats. But in the profile data fields, dates are displayed in the da mon year format (such as 12 Dec 2017). And there are no restrictions on format in the text section of a profile, where I personally prefer to use 12  December 2017.

Comments

I made a huge effort in my genealogy program to record ALL dates as dd mmm yyyy. And now that I have generated a GEDCOM and imported/added some of it I see that my format is being lost. It is in the GEDCOM as expected but being wrecked by WikiTree. This is one of a few unambiguous formats. The internal storage of dates makes absolutely no difference if you record it as a date number, not as a text string. The text format is only used for typing something in and printing or displaying something.

I am VERY much against any of the world's various date formats that are all numbers because of the opportunity to not know which 2 digit number is the month and which is the day. Right now, the Edit screen for a profile uses yyyy-xx-yy so you see my problem. The answer above says "But in the profile data fields, dates are displayed in the da mon year format (such as 12 Dec 2017)" but that must be old information because I see 2017-12-12, and THAT is the problem.

I would like to control how dates are formatted as part of my account settings to be used when I am logged in and looking at something or printing it out.

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Glen,  when entering a date, you can use the '25 Mar 2021' format or the YYYY-MM-DD format.  I guess the latter was chosen as a standard by WikiTree as it is the international (ISO) standard.  If the GEDCompare process is converting your dates into this format, it doesn't really matter in the long run, because, as mentioned above, the dates in profiles are displayed in your preferred format.  Whichever way the date was entered, when you go back to edit the profile, the edit page has the date in your preferred format, so the only time you need to suffer having to see the international standard is during the GEDCompare process.  I can understand that it must be frustrating having to see it then, as you have so many profiles to process, but I think this is unlikely to change in the near future, as things tend to take a while to change here, which is understandable with the small team and limited budget.  For what it's worth, I think the dates are converted into the international standard format as that is how they are stored in the WikiTree database.

I hope that helps.